After a pair of high-profile flops, Mandy Gonzalez finally scores a part worthy of her talents

Mandy Gonzalez grew up almost 2,800 miles from the bodegas and beauty parlors of Washington Heights. Yet the script for the buzzworthy new Broadway musical "In the Heights" read remarkably familiar to the actress.

"We had Thrifty Ice Cream, where you'd see everybody from the neighborhood," says the Santa Clarita, Calif., native. Her family formed tight relationships with her dad's co-workers' families at his glass plant company picnics, too.

That idea of community is something "Heights" audiences will recognize, regardless of ethnicity or hometown, says the actress.

"The story is for everybody," she says. "We are Latinos on stage, but this is an American story."

"Heights," opening March 9, arrives at the Richard Rodgers Theatre riding a wave of critical acclaim it earned off-Broadway last year. Among the accolades: Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortelle, and Drama Desk awards.

With music and lyrics written by its 28-year-old star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show chronicles the day-to-day immigrant family experience with sincerity, humor, a joyful Latin-beat score and eye-candy choreography.

Gonzalez portrays Nina, a Stanford University freshman, who returns to her Washington Heights neighborhood after secretly dropping out of school.

"Nina's struggling to make her own way," says Gonzalez, about an hour before curtain. "I related to it so well. It was really hard for me to leave my family even though my family was 100 percent behind me."

She's hit a few potholes on the road to a potential Broadway smash. Gonzalez won off-Broadway's Obie Award for her performance in 2001's "Eli's Coming." She followed this promising start with two stints as the princess in "Aida," first in 2001 and then again from 2002 to 2003.

But her big break was supposed to come in "Dance of the Vampires," a show billed as the next Titanic-sized musical knockout. The show ran for just four months. Then in 2005, the Latina beauty with a three-octave voice landed in "Lennon." The big-budget John Lennon bio-musical was booted out of Times Square in just over a month.

"I think the work is always there," says Gonzalez, who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her husband, Doug.

"Sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. I think 'In the Heights' is just so special and so different because it has so much heart and such a vibrancy about it. It never stops moving, kind of like the city."

The story calls for Nina to fall for Benny, another outsider because he is not Latino. Her father, the neighborhood patriarch who runs a cabbie company, initially disapproves of their romance.

Their star-crossed plot inspires obvious comparisons to Shakespeare and "West Side Story." For a while, the actress, indeed, aspired to play Maria, but that ambition has since been replaced.

"This is my 'West Side Story,'" she says. "This is my dream role we're talking about here."

Contact AWE senior writer Jodi Lee Reifer at reifer@siadvance.com.

In the HeightsLast season's off-Broadway sensation moves on up to a Great White Way house